Paul Pierson

Paul Pierson
Born	1959 Eugene, Oregon
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Oberlin College (B.A.) Yale University (Ph.D.)
Known for	Winner-Take-All Politics,  • The Transformation of American Politics,  • Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy
Scientific career
Fields	Political Science, comparative public policy
Institutions	University of California, Berkeley

Paul Pierson (born 1959) is a professor of political science and holder of the John Gross Endowed Chair of Political Science (and he holds/held the Avice Saint Chair of Public Policy) at the University of California, Berkeley. From 2007-2010 he served at UC Berkeley as Chair of the Department of Political Science. He is noted for his research on comparative public policy and political economy, the welfare state, and American political development.

Pierson is a native of Eugene, Oregon, where both of his parents taught at the University of Oregon. He graduated with a B.A. in government from Oberlin College in 1981 and then attended graduate school at Yale University, completing an M.A. and M.Phil in 1986 and a PhD degree in political science in 1989.

Pierson taught at Harvard University from 1989 to 2004, when he moved to the University of California, Berkeley. He was a visiting professor at the European University Institute in 1999.

Pierson's first book, Dismantling the Welfare State?, was a revision of his doctoral dissertation and won the American Political Science Association's Kammerer Prize for the best work on American national politics published in 1994. His journal article “Increasing Returns, Path Dependence, and the Study of Politics” won the Heinz Eulau Award for the best article published in the American Political Science Review in 2000. His most recent book is Winner-Take-All Politics.

Pierson was president of the Politics and History Section of the American Political Science Association for 2003-04.

Pierson is married to Tracey Goldberg, a landscape architect. They live in Berkeley, CA with their two children.

Selected publications

• Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer--and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class. with Jacob Hacker. Simon & Schuster. 2010. ISBN 978-1-4165-8869-6.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
• The Transformation of American Politics: Activist Government and the Rise of Conservatism. 2007. Princeton University Press. (edited with Theda Skocpol).
• Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy. 2005. Yale University Press. (with Jacob Hacker).
• Politics in Time: History, Institutions, and Social Analysis. 2004. Princeton University Press.
• "Imposing Losses in Pension Policy." 1993. In Do Institutions Matter? Government Capabilities in the United States and Abroad. Brookings Institution Press. eds. R. Kent Weaver, and Bert A. Rockman. (written with R. Kent Weaver).
• "Historical Institutionalism in Contemporary Political Science." In Political Science: The State of the Discipline, eds. I. Katznelson and H. Milner. W.W. Norton. (written with Theda Skocpol).
• The New Politics of the Welfare State. 2001. Oxford University Press. (editor).
• "Increasing Returns, Path Dependence, and the Study of Politics." 2000. American Political Science Review 94(2): 251-267.
• "Not Just What, but When: Timing and Sequence in Political Processes." 2000. Studies in American Political Development 14(1): 73-93.
• European Social Policy: Between Fragmentation and Integration. 1995. Brookings Institution Press. (edited with Stephan Leibfried).
• Dismantling the Welfare State? Reagan, Thatcher and the Politics of Retrenchment. 1994. Cambridge University Press.

External links

• University of California - Berkeley profile